The Burning
by MirrorFade
Summary: An older Neji is given the assignment that must be completed, at all costs. This is the aftermath, and his thoughts on it.


**The Burning**

_Addicted to our divine despair  
The venom of the cross we bear  
The guilt will follow us to death  
_**Soul on Fire**

He turned away so he wouldn't have to watch them die.

Their screams, so loud, so pained, rang unnaturally loud over the barren wasteland that once, not so very long ago, had been a lush valley, full of iridescent greenery and shining streams, filled with multicolored fish and stones. Once there had been a village here, small but self-sustaining, with people who smiled and laughed as they went about their days, raising their families and living alongside their friends. There had been no shinobi here, no murders hiding behind the mask that every fighter wore, the one of duty to a great cause, to country and family, and the strange thing called honor by some and lies by others. No wars, no great and terrible strife.

It had been full of life, full of love. People had lived here, loved here.

And now they died here.

The pale-eyed jounin turned his head away, because he didn't want to see the fires, didn't want to see the people whose only crime had been sheltering a man and a woman whose deaths Konoha demanded. At any cost.

Even though his eyes were averted, even though he didn't watch as his victims as they burned, as their flesh crinkled, blackened, and sizzled until they faded away from existence, there was nothing Hyuuga Neji could do that would block out the screams. Dear god, it was so loud, and it wouldn't stop, wouldn't fade, just wouldn't, and oh god, what had he done, what the hell had he just done?

At any cost. The words rang in his ears, almost as loud as the screams had and just as powerful as the silence when the villagers finally stopped wailing, when they finally died. Every last one of them. Dead. Dead and gone, leaving behind only charred corpses, charred land. The ashes of a former dream the young Konoha jounin had just turned into a nightmare.

Eliminate at any cost.

He'd done just that, completed the assignment, the A-ranked mission labeled as such not because of its potential danger to the operative, but because of what it required the shinobi foolish or desperate enough to accept it to do. Hyuuga Neji was neither foolish nor desperate for a paycheck, though the bonus he'd receive was certainly welcome, but he'd accepted the mission into Wave Country, the assignment to wipe out a village in order to eliminate the two rogue shinobi residing within it. At any cost.

Neji looked now, turned his head back to the burning and blackened remains of the small village. Fires still raged, twisting tendrils of orange and scarlet that wound themselves around the broken remains of homes and shops, devouring the remains of a life that once was, and never would be again. He looked because he had to, had to acknowledge what he'd done with the jutsu he'd learned only a few days ago.

Neji panned his eyes over the smoking wreckage, finding bodies, charred and twisted into the unnatural positions death had left them in, and the simple, mindless destruction fire left in its hungry wake. _I didn't think it would be this powerful_, a part of his mind protested weakly. _I didn't think it would be this bad_.

Liar. Of course he had. He just didn't want to admit it. Hyuuga Neji just didn't want to admit that he'd been fine with the idea of slaughtering an entire village, burning it and them until they were only charred remains, vague shadows of the life they'd once led. A part of him didn't want to admit it, but the rest of him knew it was true.

Men and women, adults and children. The fire didn't care, the fire just wanted to eat, and so it had burned them, killed them as they screamed, devouring some quickly, almost, but not quite painlessly, no, never that way, for such simply wasn't the fire's nature, and leaving others to burn slowly, killing them softly as their screams filled the air.

Silence prevailed now, save for the smoldering of timber as his jutsu burnt itself out. It was defining, and in a way, almost worse than the dark song the villagers had sung as they died, bodies burning away simply because they'd had the misfortune to be in the wrong place in the wrong time, because of the orders Hyuuga Neji had received, because the brief had said "at any cost".

The jounin with pale eyes didn't cry for them, even though a part of his soul was screaming, wailing, what had he done, why, why, WHY? He didn't cry as he turned and walked away from the results of the mission that had needed to be completed at any cost, away from the burning wreckage of a once-proud and happy village, away from the civilians and two rogue shinobi he'd slaughtered, face cold and hard, as expressionless as it had to be in situations such as this one.

And if his eyes were watering, it was only from the smoke. It wasn't from the burning dream he'd left in his wake, not from the blackened corpses twisted from the pain and terror their final moments had been filled with. It was only from the smoke.


End file.
